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When I was seven I broke into a house with some older kids one summer. This was in Russia in the 90s, as the society around us was collapsing. The fall of the Soviet Union and the descent of the country into sudden, unregulated capitalism yielded the rapid development of inequality. Seemingly overnight a place in which, for decades, people basically had the same homes, made the same paychecks, and got access to the same opportunities became a place where ostentatious wealth coexisted with grinding poverty....

I’m never at a loss for invigorating new music, but few emerging artists I encountered last year entranced me like Chicago bedroom-pop singer-songwriter Serena Isioma. The idiosyncratic and fully evolved aesthetic of their March 2020 EP, Sensitive, fulfills the promise of our allegedly “genreless” future, incorporating signifiers from across the pop spectrum: its radio-ready songs combine sensitive R&B singing, sophisticated indie-rock riffs, suave hip-hop rhythms, and featherweight synth-pop melodies, deploying every element for maximum immediacy....

Radish goradish.com Too tired to cook and put off by all the usual unhealthy delivery options? Lazy man cannot live on pizza alone, and Radish, a local tech start-up that launched in April, offers a needed solution to that dilemma: a smartphone app that seems like a mashup of Uber and Whole Foods’ food court. After downloading the app and setting up an account, you order a freshly prepared dinner to be delivered in less than 20 minutes....

Brooklyn label Nature Sounds reissued Common’s 1992 debut album, Can I Borrow a Dollar?, for this year’s Record Store Day, but last week’s most intriguing new Common release came out on an entirely different label and isn’t in brick-and-mortar stores at all yet. Last Wednesday, local DJ and record collector Marc Davis announced that his microlabel Black Pegasus was putting out a seven-inch of two previously unissued recordings from Common’s Can I Borrow a Dollar?...

Would you say your art is about being a black American?No. Well, I guess it just depends on my mood.—Afro-Futurist artist Hebru Brantley, responding to a question in a 2011 Reader interview As Dery points out in the introduction to his 1993 interview collection Black to the Future, Afro-Futurism is a logical means of expression because “African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements: official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind)....

Dave Zuchowski Chicago Reed Quartet Last year the Chicago Reed Quartet, one of the city’s most potent and promising new improvised-music ensembles, disbanded suddenly after Ken Vandermark quit in the fall; he also shut down his spectacular Audio One at the same time, essentially withdrawing from his two main Chicago-based projects. Before the group fell apart it had been rehearsing and developing its repertoire, and last August it spent an afternoon recording at the Hungry Brain for a debut album....

Sameena Mustafa has had a successful career as a real estate broker working with nonprofits and small businesses in addition to a rising profile in the city’s comedy scene. In 2015 she cofounded Simmer Brown, a South Asian comedy collective. But the 2016 election made her take a hard look at the local political arena and decide to get involved. Now Mustafa, 47, is one of three Democratic primary challengers to incumbent Fifth District U....

The Chicago Public Schools will be on Spring Break next week, and while we’re still not out of the woods in terms of unfettered travel, many of us are craving some adventure. Here are a few ideas for road trips that will keep you within Illinois, followed by some online recommendations so you can check out the world from the comfort of that Meister Bräu-themed cabana that you built for your backyard....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 14, 2016. Have a great weekend! Rahm looks ahead to a possible third term Mayor Rahm Emanuel is only a year into his second term as mayor, but there are signs that he’s preparing for another run in February 2019. Emanuel told the Tribune that he has “every intention of running again” but he’ll have to discuss a final decision with his wife, Amy Rule....

Since November, the Harold Washington Library Center has hosted an excellent free exhibit on the life and career of Reverend Clay Evans, corresponding with the establishment of a permanent archive devoted to him. The 92-year-old retired in 2000, after serving as an anchor for the city’s faithful for decades: among his countless achievements, the pastor and activist founded the famed Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, cofounded Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, hosted the What a Fellowship Hour on radio and TV, and released a series of seriously smoking gospel recordings (which is why he’s in this music column)....

While electric guitarist Dan Phillips spends most of his time in Bangkok, Thailand, where he teaches music at Silpakorn University, he heads back to Chicago every year to visit family and reconnect with a music scene that shaped his aesthetic sense. Most of his local gigs this time have been with shifting four-piece lineups that pit his liquid tone and fluent phrasing against a series of extroverted horn or keyboard players....

Bryan Murray Myra Melford The final concert of the season in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series happens on Monday night, marking the end of the curatorial efforts here by Anna Clyne and Mason Bates. The pair have functioned as Mead Composers-in-Residence at the CSO for the past five years, and part of the job involves programming this new-music series—they’re going out on a high note, with work by some composers who deftly straddle the worlds of jazz, improvised music, and new music....

I have to admit, I literally slept on going to Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake’s winter solstice concerts for the first 27 years (though granted, I was only 17 when the first one happened). Out-of-town friends even crashed at my pad to attend the early-morning shows, but as a former night owl, I always thought 6 AM was just too early. That finally changed last year, as this old dog has finally become capable of getting up at a decent hour....

Black comedy doesn’t get any blacker than The Death of Stalin, which mines laughs from one of the most brutal and frightening regimes in modern history. Adapting a graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, British writer and director Armando Iannucci dramatizes the night in March 1953 when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin—who had killed 20 million people, sent 18 million to the gulags as slave labor, and exiled ten million more—keeled over of a cerebral hemorrhage, his subsequent death setting off a power struggle between the Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev, and the state apparatus, led by Stalin’s first lieutenant and head of secret police, Lavrenti Beria....

Hands-down the funniest moment of 2016 happened at Riot Fest, during the insanely hyped reunion of Misfits members Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only, and Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein. In the middle of an uncomfortably long stretch of between-song banter, while the front man explained how he thought the giant glowing pumpkins on the stage were “cool as shit,” someone behind me cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Shut up, Danzig!...

The late 50th Ward alderman Bernard “Berny” Stone was a colorful character. Elected in 1973 under Mayor Richard J. Daley, he presided over the far-north-side West Ridge community for nearly four decades. Throughout his career Stone was famous for his feistiness. Earlier this month, Silverstein showed good sportsmanship when she joined Emanuel and members of Stone’s family to cut the ribbon on Bernard Stone Park, a memorial to her former foe....

By definition, all theater is some sort of cosplay, and by golly does this stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1996 BBC Two series and subsequent novelization lean into the LARP-iest version of it. Ilesa Duncan’s adventurous revival of Robert Kauzlaric’s play (originally directed for Lifeline by Paul S. Holmquist in 2010) showcases both the merits and drawbacks of fantasy onstage—but it’s inarguably one hell of a visual trip. A moderately successful and majorly bored office drone (Jose Nateras) upends his whole universe when he crosses paths with a magical being (Samantha Newcomb) on the run from a pair of wisecracking interdimensional bogeymen (John Henry Roberts, LaQuin Groves)....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. When Tink performed at Adrianna’s for the first time, it was summer 2012, and the Chicago rapper and R&B artist was just 17—not even old enough to get into the Markham nightclub and banquet hall. But she had a chance to open for Future at one of the underground rap world’s answers to Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and she wasn’t going to pass it up....

Sometimes I’m a shitty beer writer. It might sound like I’m being too hard on myself, especially if you’re a fan (I must have a couple, right?). But how else can you explain that this is my first column on 5 Rabbit? Today the core team at 5 Rabbit is cofounder Andres Araya, minority partner Randy Mosher, and head brewer John J. Hall, who was hired away from Goose Island in September 2012....

Nearly 40 years after it was first released, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981) is no longer a warning of a coming dystopian future. Instead, it’s a vision of a bombed-out dystopian past that has become our present. But while Escape is off in some details, its overall vision is disquietingly on point. Anticipating 9/11, the story is built around a plane crash in New York that precipitates a global crisis....